Things You Like/Dislike About TCGs. Gameplaywise

[Captain Karnage]

So like the topic says I want to know your likes and dislikes about TCGs. The reason I'm asking is some of my friends who I play Magic the Gathering and Force of Will with took an intrest in my idea for an LCG (Living Card Game) called Legends. It uses Magics's Legendary rule, however it's based on the characters name rather than their title, Force of Wills 1 attacker at a time battle mechanic, and a system where you can play a better version of a Legend for cheaper, and you will always have acces to the highest version of 1 legend outside of the deck. An idea I'm still working on is resorce fixing, the current idea is that only once per turn you will get a stone that will produce 1 of the 5 available colors of your choice.

I'm wanting to know if there's anything that really drives you away from this type of game, and what draws you to one

[eclipse]

- For the love of everything, don't make my purchases worthless.  Yes, I'm looking at you, every single card game that rotates their sets.

- Force of Will fixed the biggest issue I had with Magic, which was severe mana screwage.  It still had its moments, though (hi Gretel).

- Eventually, things will get COMPLICATED.  Just take a read through the full rules of Force of Will.  You'll have to decide how tricky you want things to get.  My preferred method is "owner of the effects decides what order they go off in".

- Between Magic and Force of Will, I liked the latter's combat system better.  It made things less headache-inducing.

Not sure how much this helps.

[Captain Karnage]

44 minutes ago, eclipse said:

- For the love of everything, don't make my purchases worthless.  Yes, I'm looking at you, every single card game that rotates their sets.

- Force of Will fixed the biggest issue I had with Magic, which was severe mana screwage.  It still had its moments, though (hi Gretel).

- Eventually, things will get COMPLICATED.  Just take a read through the full rules of Force of Will.  You'll have to decide how tricky you want things to get.  My preferred method is "owner of the effects decides what order they go off in".

- Between Magic and Force of Will, I liked the latter's combat system better.  It made things less headache-inducing.

Not sure how much this helps.

I don't plan on rotations, only banning cards if the prove to be too powerful, gamebreaking, or problematic

mana fixing is even better, you get to choose what color you want each turn

it's going to use the stack like magic, and I promise that Black Moonbeam will never exist

[SoulWeaver]

2 minutes ago, Captain Karnage said:

I don't plan on rotations, only banning cards if the prove to be too powerful, gamebreaking, or problematic

So long as you don't pull a Konami and ban key cards from older decks for the main purpose of getting people to buy new cards, sounds good. F&L List was a good idea until they figured out they could force us to buy new Yu-Gi-Oh! by banning all the good stuff of old Yu-Gi-Oh! and then it went downhill really fast.

I would say do both formats if possible - have a Set Rotation for those who want that kind of play, and an Unlimited + F&L List for those used to that.

No way you can avoid this, but power creeping sucks. It's the ultimate bane of every TCG out there and they all have to start using it eventually because otherwise how will you get people to buy new stuff if the old stuff they already have is as effective if not more so?

[Captain Karnage]

16 minutes ago, SoulWeaver said:

So long as you don't pull a Konami and ban key cards from older decks for the main purpose of getting people to buy new cards, sounds good. F&L List was a good idea until they figured out they could force us to buy new Yu-Gi-Oh! by banning all the good stuff of old Yu-Gi-Oh! and then it went downhill really fast.

I would say do both formats if possible - have a Set Rotation for those who want that kind of play, and an Unlimited + F&L List for those used to that.

No way you can avoid this, but power creeping sucks. It's the ultimate bane of every TCG out there and they all have to start using it eventually because otherwise how will you get people to buy new stuff if the old stuff they already have is as effective if not more so?

part of the plan is to not make an all in one counterspell and for them to be unable to stop Legends from being played, and I don''t plan on adding in counterspells untill I find out what the weakest color is.

[Zera]

Oh man, I have so much to say about Yugioh, the first (and currently last) TCG/CCG I have played. Here is the nutshell -

1. Complexity creep is BAD. Tell someone "6+ years" old to play Yugioh, and they'll literally spend an entire day trying to parse its mechanics. Not even the individual cards, just the summoning rules and how chains work and all that junk. When you get to the cards, it's even worse. What. The. Heck.
2. Power creep is EVEN WORSE. I reckon at least 80% of Yugioh cards in are unusable, and that's a conservative estimate. No matter how many cards you buy, you always have to buy more. I once almost had a competitive deck, and it cost me well over a full-price retail video game. F*** power creep!
3. Cards that only come in high rarities are just another way to separate the haves and the have-nots. F*** rarity exclusive cards!

So that's why I permanently quit Yugioh. It had a lot of potential to not suck. But then it sucked. Really hard.

Meanwhile, David Sirlin, a professional competitive game designer (he did the Smash Bros Brawl tutorials), spent 10 years making Codex, a card game whose sole purpose was to savagely murder all the other CCGs. I don't know much else about it yet, but it looks awesome.

[Time the Crestfallen]

1. Power creep. This one is obvious, but when viable decks and cards can become completely useless, there's gonna be some major fucking problems especially when entire mechanics can get power-creeped (RIP Fusion and Ritual summon, praise the glorious XYZ/Synchro master race).

2. Complexity creep. As the user above me said, trying to explain modern Yu-Gi-Oh to someone who's never played the game is nightmarish and certain cards and archetypes just get ridiculous. #FuckPendulum

3. Stagnant meta games. This varies from game-to-game, but playing on DuelingNexus is a miserable slog of Zoodiac, True Draco and Windwitch players with the odd Blue-Eyes thrown in every once-in-a-while (and every single one of them is gonna be doing the Utopia/the Lightning combo). This is especially bad since the only way to get around it is to wait for the next expansion to drop and have some new OP bullshit sweep the meta or break out the bans which, in my experience, either doesn't do enough or neuters the deck and makes it useless.

4. The enforced and arbitrary rarity of cards, especially when a disproportionate number of rare cards tend to be the most ridiculously overpowered. It does nothing but put a price-gate on competitive play and feeds the forging business.

5. How easy it is to shut-down monster cards relative to spell cards. This is more of pet-peeve, but the risk/reward for summoning monsters is extremely unbalanced.

This is why I always felt like Duel Masters/Kaijudo was the most well-designed TCG. The issues are all there of course, but I always felt like it was to a significantly lesser degree.

Edited August 28, 2017 by Mortarion

[MediocreLee]

5 hours ago, Zera said:

Oh man, I have so much to say about Yugioh, the first (and currently last) TCG/CCG I have played. Here is the nutshell -

1. Complexity creep is BAD. Tell someone "6+ years" old to play Yugioh, and they'll literally spend an entire day trying to parse its mechanics. Not even the individual cards, just the summoning rules and how chains work and all that junk. When you get to the cards, it's even worse. What. The. Heck.
2. Power creep is EVEN WORSE. I reckon at least 80% of Yugioh cards in are unusable, and that's a conservative estimate. No matter how many cards you buy, you always have to buy more. I once almost had a competitive deck, and it cost me well over a full-price retail video game. F*** power creep!
3. Cards that only come in high rarities are just another way to separate the haves and the have-nots. F*** rarity exclusive cards!

So that's why I permanently quit Yugioh. It had a lot of potential to not suck. But then it sucked. Really hard.

Meanwhile, David Sirlin, a professional competitive game designer (he did the Smash Bros Brawl tutorials), spent 10 years making Codex, a card game whose sole purpose was to savagely murder all the other CCGs. I don't know much else about it yet, but it looks awesome.

I have to agree with you on some of these points. I don't play competitively and I'm still stuck on some stuff.  A thing I dislike about Yu-Gi-Oh! are the freakin' Pendulums..  They're so powerful they brought Raigeki back!  I mostly enjoy Yu-Gi-Oh! for the nostalgia really...even though my main deck is a Noble Knights one.

The TCG that I'm super into right is the Final Fantasy TCG.  Things I like with the gameplay:

• I really enjoy the potential synergy certain cards have with each other.  Such as the Type-0 cards meshing super well with each other.  
• The Damage Zone is a good twist on the usual way to keep track of who's winning and the fact that EX Bursts are free abilities can help turn the tide of the game.

Things I dislike about the gameplay:

• How confusing and weird the health/damage can be.  Since HP and damage are the same thing in this game, it often leads to confusion for some players about what does what and if a character will be KO'd.
• Some cards are simply way better than others for a much lower cost sometimes and it really sucks.  Machina has an ability that can essentially wipe your opponent's side of the field while Red XIII's ability can only wipe the weaker characters and he has a higher cost to pay to use his ability, but they both have similar abilities.